44

I'm trying to determine what's eating almost half of disk on my Windows 7 Lenovo laptop but haven't been able to determine what. I read some of the answers on this site but none of the causes seems to be the cause of my problem.

What I've done so far:

  • Checked Windows' System Restore points but only minimum use, either way I deleted around 2GB if usage from there
  • Used WinDirStat and it came back with a total of 71.3GB usage at the root level
  • C Drives properties says 135GB being used out of 138 GB total, ie, 135 GB - 71.3GB = 63.7GB missing somewhere
  • No "Unknown" files reported by WinDirStat
  • Windows Disk Management utility doesn't report any unused partitions or unclaimed space
  • chkdsk comes out clean
  • Windows disk cleanup tool doesn't report anything big, just small stuff in the lower MB range
  • Lenovo backup tool hasn't been used nor there is a folder for the backup images

Any idea on what to look at and/or do?

EDIT: some additional info...

WinDirStat

Disk Properties

Windows Disk Management

Gareth
  • 19,080
Tavo3
  • 699

6 Answers6

25

Well, I found what the problem was....

I installed SpaceSniffer and initially it gave me the same numbers as WinDirStat, but it also gave me some warnings about some directories it could not read, and among one of them was the Lenovo RRbackups backup directory that I thought it was not there since neither Windows Explorer nor WinDirStat showed.

So I ran the tool again but with Administrator privileges and voila, it found the big a... GB file inside the RRbackups directory that the Lenovo utility creates and that I couldn't see before. It turns out somebody ran the backup tool without me knowing.

I should have suspected that it was a permissions issue even though I was logged in with an account that is a member of the administrators group. Way to go Microsoft with Windows 7, an administrators group that doesn't have administrators privileges.... go figure...

Thanks all for the tips...

Tavo3
  • 699
15

Run WinDirStat in administrator mode (it's a right click option). Some files can't be seen without this.

My culprit was MSSQL log files. One of them was 170GB.

jnnnnn
  • 421
1

I had a similar situation on a Windows 7 laptop where nearly 500 GB was "missing" on my system partition. The partition was full, but Windows Explorer was unable to detect the missing space, and the "windirstat" program simply showed a 500 GB "unknown" entry.

However, the TreeSize Free (Administrator) program (https://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/) was able to show what the problem was, namely that someone had misconfigured the Cobian Backup program such that the source and destination directories were the same. As a consequence, it recursed until the partition filled up AND made nearly infinitely long directory paths that neither Windows Explorer nor windirstat were able to handle.

Perhaps needless to say, none of the Windows directory removal tools, including cmd rmdir, would work to remove this mess and it was with great difficulty that I finally managed to clean it up.

Joe Smith
  • 11
1

What works for me was lowering space for Previous versions of files (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/previous-versions-files-faq#1TC=windows-7).

  1. Click Start Icon
  2. Left Click on "Computer" and click on Properties
  3. Click on "System Protection" on left side
  4. Click on Disk and "Configure"
  5. Lower your quota
Aendil
  • 11
0

We had a similar issue where a user's machine had somehow turned on 'offline files' and so in the C:\Windows\CSC\v2.0.6\namesapace[file server]\ directory there were 164GB of space. Running WDS as admin couldn't find it but after reading dozens of boards and seeing frequent votes for TreeSize, I gave it a shot. This allowed me to identify where the space was being consumed, but in order to get rid of it I needed to go to the CSC directory and take ownership of it. This took a little while but worked. Other suggestions that i tried prior to taking ownership include using the GUI to disable 'offline files' and create an entry in the registry to format the offline files database. Neither of those two items worked.

Michael
  • 11
0

Assuming that there's files hidden away from the system, it probably should show up in rootkitrevealer - while it won't tell you filesizes, this should get you started on working out where the rest of the space went.

Alternately, i'd suggest running a windirstat equivilent off a linux live cd of some sort to bypass any OS level hiding of free space, and have similar graphical tools.

Journeyman Geek
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